Londonist in your inbox

Plan your day ahead or read the day's London headlines with our daily emails.

Things to do in London (weekday picks sent at 7pm the night before)Londonist Daily (news and features digest, sent out at 5pm each day)Best of Londonist (weekly email, sent Sunday morning)The Weekend Guide (sent Thursday lunchtime)

Follow Londonist

New Cycling Group To Protest At Kings Cross Tonight

The Ghost Bike for Deep Lee, where tonight's protest takes place.

A new campaign group is planning to block the Kings Cross Gyratory at rush hour this evening as part of the continuing protests against TfL’s management of the road system in that area and elsewhere in London.

BikesAlive have called the action in a blog post entitled Enough is Enough, where they state that: “Polite meeting and symbolic action are having no effect. We need to act. The time has surely come for cyclists to (nonviolently) defend ourselves”. The group states this will be the first of a weekly protest action until TfL takes action to make its junctions safe for all users.

Within the cycle campaigning movement, boosted in numbers by the events of 2011, there has always been some disagreement about tactics like road blocks as a common tool of protest. However, as the protest from the London Assembly over Blackfriars showed, TfL continues to operate without democratic oversight and thus it is very hard, without direct Mayoral intervention (as Chair of TfL), to have any impact on their decision making process.

Green AM Jenny Jones is due to attend. She said, “London’s roads must be fixed urgently if we are to make them safe for cyclists and all other road users. This is the Mayor’s responsibility, and I hope that if we make a statement through peaceful, direct action he will start to listen.” The protest also has the backing of disability access group Transport for All, but has not had an official nod from the London Cycling Campaign.

It’s also fair to say that the deadly Kings Cross Junction in question is badly flawed, was known to TfL to be a safety risk and that their plans to change it before the Olympics will not solve the problem of two lanes merging into one, through a high speed junction, with no space for cycling.

No progress has yet been reported on calls to charge TfL with corporate manslaughter over the death of ‘Deep’ Lee, whose tragic death last year launched Kings Cross’s knotted gyratory to the top of the cycling agenda.

If you are heading to or though the Kings Cross area tonight, and not on your bike, you may wish to avail yourself of the Tube rather than taking the bus.

what bout the pedestrians knocked into by cyclists who do not stop at crossings or red lights? You can walk down the road at night and you can count many bikes without any lights making them a danger to themselves and the public.
Some motorists are irresponsible and some cyclists too.If these protests obstruct my journey home then there will be trouble

Peter

We are talking about a fatality here. There have been no pedestrians killed in London by cyclists. Thousands by motorists. When you say trouble, are you making threats?

Dave H

Oooh, trouble. No-one wants that.

Beth A

It’s a shame you immediately jump on this tired old topic. In fact the protest last night was about *pedestrians* and cyclists. There were many people walking there with the cyclists and we all demand that TfL stop removing *pedestrian crossings* as well as extending crossing phases for pedestrian crossings and listen to their own engineers about unsafe road design.

There’s no question that some cyclists are irresponsible, but painting everybody with the same brush is simply ludicrous. I cycle, drive or walk central London every day and for every one cyclist I see going through red lights I see equal amounts of cars and drivers running red lights and talking on phones so let’s not go down this road. Although I suspect if cyclists never went through red lights, you’d still not like them anyway.

Let’s stop this ‘tribes’ argument and stop threatening people and understand this is a group of people trying to make London a better and safer place for our more vulnerable road users.

Harry Cole

TROUBLE

Harry Cole

I’m sorry if you get delayed Bibi and I’m sorry about all the invisible cyclists you see everywhere, they annoy me too but I’ve got a 6000 candlepower front light and drivers still pull out in front of me. People are dying, we are losing young, talented people because of recklessly stupid road design and the criminally negligent policy of putting motor vehicles and their fast movement a priority over all other concerns, including the lives of vulnerable road users. Things have to change.